Large language models are a single kind of AI, and a particularly annoying kind when you are forced to use them for deterministic or fact seeking tasks

or did you read the article? you're probably an LLM. why am I here? fuck this website

How to use LLMs? There’s no “how to use LLMs”, you just tell them what you want, and they give it to you. Or they give you sometimes, and sometimes they give you something else. Or they’re telling you they’re giving you exactly what you want, but don’t. Or they seem like they’re giving you what you want, only it’s got a secret mistake somewhere inside, that you need to dig through and search for. Maybe there’s no mistake after all.

Yes, this is clearly a new wonder-technology, and all criticisms of it are just old people, back on their cloud-yelling bullshit.

For my uses, my rule is "long to research, but easy to verify". I only ask for things I can quickly determine if they're right or not, I just don't want to spend half an hour googling and sorting though the data.

For most of my queries there's an acceptable margin of error, which is generally unavoidable AI or not. Google isn't guaranteed to return everything you might want either.

There’s chat-vs-api; same model answers differently depending on input channel.

There’s also statistical. Once in a rare while, a response will be gibberish. Same prompt, same model, same input mode. 70% of the time, sane and similar answers. 0.01% of the time, gibberish. In-between, a sliding-scale — with a ‘cursed middle’ of answers that are mostly viable except for one poisoned thing that’s hard to auto-detect…